Yesterday,
Twitter unveiled a revamped version of its website that it hopes
will be much easier to navigate and advertise on, The
New York Timesreports.

“It’s
going to increase the value that people are getting out of Twitter,
so in less time you can get more information and value,” Twitter
co-founder Evan Williams told NYT.

Twitter's
wide user base is appealing to advertisers, but the layout of the
website has been a hindrance to them. Twitter currently runs ads
called Promoted Tweets, but the new layout should boost ads
because of "more real estate and more engagement," Williams
told NYT.

Rather
than having to click through to a different webpage to see
information about a user or post in the Twitter timeline (as it
functions now), the redesign will break the page into two panes. The
timeline will appear on the left pane, while information from bits of
the timeline -- author biographies, multimedia, etc. -- will appear
in the right pane, eliminating the need to click back and forth.

Williams
told NYT that the redesign was geared, first and
foremost, to improve the user experience, but that advertisers would
benefit as well. An example the Times used to
illustrate this benefit is when a film company puts out a "sponsored
tweet" for a new film that contains a trailer. Rather than
clicking on a link within the tweet and being taken to the website
that hosts the trailer, viewers will be able to view the trailer
directly on Twitter's left panel.

Twitter
boasts approximately 160 million users -- a surprisingly large
amount, given the website's difficulty to navigate, Williams said.
While the company has raised $160 million in venture capital, it has
struggled to control its own growth -- as evidenced by almost daily
"Twitter is over capacity" errors at certain times of the
day.

A
common complaint by many who do not use the service is that they just
don't understand how it works or what it's for. With the new design,
which should launch in the next few weeks, Twitter is seemingly
aiming its sights on joining the likes
of Facebook and Google as an internet "superpower."

"I'm an Internet expert too. It's all right to wire the industrial zone only, but there are many problems if other regions of the North are wired." -- North Korean Supreme Commander Kim Jong-il